Do You Hear What I Hear? With Judith Pinkerton

February 4, 2025 Adiel Gorel

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Do You Hear What I Hear? With Judith Pinkerton

How Prescribed Music Therapy Leads To Less Stress And Better Health Outcomes

Everyone, it’s great to be here once again. I’m very excited to have Judith Pinkerton on our show. I’m fascinated by your subject. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, Adiel. I look forward to finding out more about what you think of this. I always learn something.

Journey To Becoming A Music Therapist

I’m very pleased. To give us the background, if you can please share your own journey, how things started, how did you get to where you are now. I’m sure that everybody would like to know that.

I had not known about music therapy for a very long time. I decided and discovered that I would play the violin, I’m a professional violinist over decades, and when I would play the violin people would like it, and they wanted to listen to it. When I had this experience with my husband at the time, needing emergency back surgery, and this is back in like 1986, this is a long time ago, I decided that I wanted to record music for him because I had recalled that over the months that if I played the violin for a night that he may not need his high blood pressure medication and would sleep more like a baby.

Anyway, he goes in for emergency back surgery and I decided out of my love for him that I just play into a cassette tape. That’s how long ago it was. I’m playing into this cassette tape, just music that I remembered that he liked to listen to, that I liked to play. Got into the hospital after his surgery that day and pushed play on the Walkman at the time. He was in the hospital bed, prone, forced to listen to it.

The nurse came in a couple of times, remember straight-up noon, 12:15, 12:30, she returned with a hypodermic needle to administer the post-surgical high blood pressure medication, takes his vital signs, whips around to me and said, “What’s he listening to?” Like, “Me.” I was pretty embarrassed because I had not gone into a recording studio, to record the music. She’s like, “What do you mean me?” I’m like, “I play the violin.” Apologetically. She said, “This is impossible. I’m supposed to give him medication right now and he doesn’t need it.”

I’m like, “Isn’t that good?” I looked at her, scratched out the word medication in his medical notes, and wrote that music instead had been used to bring it into a normal range. At that point went, “How did that happen?” I had no clue that there was a music therapy profession. I didn’t even know the phrase. All I knew was that I had been smitten. I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. Being in Anchorage, Alaska, I had no clue about music therapy, which was more obvious down in the lower 48, as we would call it.

I got into a situation where I was forced to move to Las Vegas because my husband at the time accepted a job at UNLV. UNLV moved us down to Las Vegas. I bumped into a music therapist and went to a music therapy conference in San Diego immediately and just fell in love with the profession, with the people, and just knew that that’s what I want. In fact, I can still feel the tears coming up because I think I cried throughout the whole conference, and I found my tribe.

This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. What’s interesting, Adiel, music therapists can do music therapy their entire life. When you get bored with or burned out or whatever with one particular population, you can shift into another type of population and stay in the field. There’s much breadth and opportunity for music therapists.

This makes sense to me on many levels, but I will go back to something specific in your story and ask, when you play the violin for your husband in the hospital, what kind of music did you play?

Good question, because it’s a very important one to understand what is healing music. At that point in time, healing music for him was music that he loved to listen to. There was some Irish stuff. There was some popular stuff. There was music that he got conditioned to because I liked to play it. That was on there as well.

There’s something here that’s very revealing because I could have expected an answer like, “Of course, I played classical music.” No, you said the music that he likes. I mean, that actually makes a lot of sense. I mean, if he liked death metal music, I guess in some way it would still make sense to play that, right?

Yeah, in fact, I will share another music therapist’s story. There’s a video that can be shared as well, where she talks about this incident, where actually music can harm. In this particular instance, the young man was in a coma in the hospital where she was working as a music therapist. The family, thinking that they were doing the right thing was playing classical music. What the staff was about ready to do was administer a sedative, because his vitals were going in the wrong direction.

They called in the music therapist, my friend, and she was observing everything and realized, “What does he like to listen to?” The mother said, “No, we cannot listen to that. No way we’re not listening to that.” The music therapist knew that she could probably get the information more readily out of his siblings. She found out what he indeed preferred, which was gangster rap, and played it. His vitals came into normal range and they did not have to administer sedatives.

Her comment was the mother was trying to do the best that she thought was necessary for him. The truth is that when you become conditioned by music, they needed to address right then and there, what was going to support his vital signs coming into normal range. She said, “We’ll deal with his taste later.” Notice whatever the situation was that got him into the hospital don’t know if it was environmental or related to people that enjoy that music, have no clue.

The point is that in the moment, a music therapist is going to be extremely aware of physiology, behavior, and emotions, digging out the right information that you need possibly from resources like family members to make sure that the music is properly administered. No matter what it is, hopefully, it’s something that can be performed live. Live is always best but there’s a lot of recorded music out there that you can access that can have the same benefit if the sound system is good. You have to have good quality.

The Power Of Music Vs. Spoken Word In Communication

It makes much sense on many levels because we’re talking now. Basically, we are creating sounds. Basically, we’re not singing, we’re speaking but we create sounds, we hear each other. If I felt very anxious, you could talk me down. The sound of your voice might calm me down. Music, in a way, it’s the same, but the spoken word can be misinterpreted or triggered. In other words, our mind gets in the way, whereas in music, the vibrations just happen. It’s more universal. My filter says that the sentence really offended me. No, the music doesn’t go through that filter. It would make perfect sense that it would be an effective tool to communicate and to have an effect on people, right?

Yeah. Music instantly activates the central nervous system. It has a whole body, whole brain effect. When you understand the dynamics of that, you become more serious about the intentional use of music. What I discovered over and over again is that people are loving music because it validates experience. It can maybe temporarily relieve a bad mood, but when not intentionally orchestrated in their life, it can actually keep them trapped in what I’ve come to find and title a chronic comfort zone.

This chronic comfort zone perpetuates through all aspects of your life and your music habits, which could be music performance or music listening, will reinforce that comfort zone. Because of the transformative way that our central nervous system interacts with music, it can mislead one into thinking that I am now normal as a result of listening to that music. When indeed what has occurred is out of the pandemic that we survived, that we now knew that we were going to have a new normal.

That new normal is actually normalized chaos. That what we are used to is disruption. That’s become a normal part of our life. We have become chronically comforted in that because we had no other choice. We were constantly being told what to do, when to do, how to do, or not do, more likely not do. We got really normalized to the chaos that was created out of that. Our music habits look for situations to temporarily relieve a bad mood or to validate our experience.

Either one of those does not take the choices that you can make in intentional music listening or performing to such a deep level that it becomes life-transforming as you process emotions from your broad landscape. Doesn’t matter whether it’s anger, anxiety, depression, or sadness that are problems. You can also have problems with not being able to relax or not being able to sustain happiness. Those are all problem areas. When you understand how to apply music more as a medicinal component in your life, then you have the power to intentionally address emotional processing in as little as fifteen minutes once how to do it.

When you say it’s only 15 minutes, is it 15 minutes with a music therapist or is it 15 minutes you listening to something?

A music therapist is going to want to take more time than that but what I’ve been able to do is to take my vast learning, more than 11,000 clients in residential addiction treatment centers, and package it in such a way that literally within 15 minutes, once you understand the system, you can have a major catharsis. Imagine being really stressed out and you’ve got to go in and make a presentation and you are not fit.

You are consumed by something that you just learned. What you can do intentionally is go into your specialized playlist that you learn how to create and call quickly what we call a prescriptive playlist so that you are validating, neutralizing, and shifting in as little as 10 to 15 minutes, and you are ready to go into that meeting with a renewed sense of confidence and letting go what you just experienced.

A prescriptive playlist implies, and we’ve already alluded to before, that it’s very individual.

What might stop pain for me might create pain for you.

We can think about the old cliché that when we were young, our parents would say, “What’s this horrible noise that you’re listening to?” We would say, “No, we’re talking about the Beatles here or something, it’s beautiful.” The parents heard it as noise. When they were young, their parents heard what they were listening to as noise and on and forth. I mean, yeah, it’s individualized.

Starting Music Therapy With Clients Facing Anxiety

The noise that maybe when we were little, we were listening to was good, our parents would have gone crazy with that noise. When you come in, let’s say you meet with a person and the person tells you, “You know I have a lot of anxiety in my life. I’m worried about my children. I’m worried about my relationship. I’m worried about my business.” I’m trying to make it as generic as I can. I’m walking around and I’m anxious. Where would you start?

What music do you like to listen to?

I’ll play the role. I am a product of the 1970s. I like classic rock and blues.

Depending on what you would tell me you’re having challenges with. In fact, I can pull out a story real quick about an occupational therapist that I was aware of that was on disability with a state for depression. He was a blues guitar player, and he played in a blues band. I thought, “Here he is keeping himself trapped in the blues, performing it, having a little bit of a catharsis playing it, but he’s not shifting himself totally out of it that he’s able to continue his disability check with depression.” Whereas if he followed the protocol, the disability check might go away because he’s no longer depressed. Of course, I don’t want to be that trite about it, but it can address situations that are complex.

Can Music Therapy Help People Without Major Issues?

I’m going to ask you something coming from a different side a little bit. We talked about somebody who has an issue. In this case, it was anxiety or depression. How about just a regular person who goes about life feeling pretty okay and yet one could argue we are bombarded with stressors from the outside, EMF, noises, the news, the social media? Every person, even though they claim they feel normal and fine, couldn’t they use music therapy to be better.

I created a curriculum for people like that, you and me, that think that we’ve got it handled, but yet there will be situations that occur where you’re like, “I wish I didn’t have to think about that right now.” This curriculum is called the 6 Habits of Music Medicine for Highly Empowered People. It reviews six habits of music listening that have a common practice that people may do. You learn about what the highly empowered practice is with five activities that you process through her habit.

It ends up being like a 30-day process if you decide to do one every day. At the end of that time, what you’ve done is you have built your toolbox of all of these tools that broaden your awareness about not only your emotional landscape, but about others that share it with you, and how to discuss it with them. This is about opening conversations because we have much divisiveness and emotions out of control create more divisiveness.

“Don’t want to be a part of that person’s expression.” This allows you to build a different conversation with somebody regarding music. We all connect to music. When you can have a conversation with somebody that completely takes away the divisiveness and you start building empathy, it’s amazing how that empathy can cross over into other areas. Once you have discovered what they chose and why they chose particular kinds of music, the story is everything.

When you hear somebody’s story and how they connect something, it just makes that music come alive differently. Many times I’ll have people go, “I would never have listened to that piece of music until you started sharing something else with me about that. I have a whole new look on it.” I will tell you, I just had a session recently with a client in her 80s. She’s been with me for a while and I realized, “Something’s not working here. We need to change things up.”

I have to follow my intuition a lot. I had no clue whether this was going to work or not. I’m never really sure until you get the result, but it ended up being the absolute best thing I could have done. I picked a metal band called I Prevail, and the song was, let me see if I can look at it real quick. This is really interesting. Rise Above It in the album called Trauma, featuring Justin Stone. You would think that somebody that is in their 80s would never listen to metal.

She came away because she was educated and experienced with these prescriptive playlists. She was like, “I love this.” It’s validating something inside of me that is very angry about what I’m experiencing in life. It makes me determined to get through it. It’s interesting that the band’s called I Prevail. I’m going to prevail over this situation. I immediately shifted her prescriptive playlist, which is beautiful because you can constantly be switching things in and out of the playlist as life evolves because we’re never the same.\

If you don't allow your anger to be expressed in a healthy way, then it's going to erupt as road rage, as violence. Share on X

Fortunately, the music industry is constantly producing new pieces of music for us to consider. She has metal, and it’s not uncommon, she’s had metal before, but I was really elated to find the importance of this particular song. When you listen to it, you’ll understand. It’s seeking to really match that sense of anger so then people will go, “Why do you want to do that? I don’t want to feel that.” The important thing here is that if you don’t allow your anger to be expressed in a healthy way, then it’s going to erupt as road rage, as violence.

Objective Music And Its Emotional Impact

You really are basically saying something that makes much sense just by being human beings, we run the gamut of emotions. It doesn’t matter, somebody could be 80s or a teenager, still human beings with emotions. There’s anger, there’s elation, there’s love, there’s frustration, it makes sense from that perspective. When I was in my teens and early twenties, I was very interested in the work of Gurdjieff and his chief disciple was Ouspensky. Ouspensky knew how to write better than Gurdjieff about what Gurdjieff was doing. He had this mansion not far from Paris where the devotees or the people who were there doing serious spiritual work.

Gurdjieff kept talking about objective music. Objective music, that was something. He had a lot of music performances there where his definition of objective music was, the way that I remember, I could be wrong, that the player of the music has an intention for the exact emotional effect it has on the listener and that effect is achieved. In other words, I’m playing something and my aim is to have my audience cry and they cry. That’s what they call objective music. How do we connect between that older definition of his into what you’re seeing every day?

There is an objective in the intentional use of music: to find music that corresponds to each of your emotions, and we all have a broad emotional landscape. Share on X

I really love that and I had not heard that phrase before. Thank you for introducing that to me because there is an objective about intentional use of music and that objective is to find music that corresponds to each of your emotions. We all have this broad emotional landscape. The challenge is finding music that resonates with you where you can say that that music brings up a pure quality of anger, a pure quality of grief, a pure quality of anxiety, a pure quality of peace, a pure quality of happiness.

It’s that music that we’re looking for, and we actually have a music medicine library of hundreds, of pieces of music that we’ve found work over time because we’ve done our mood music analysis on it. When you can find that right music and populate it in such a way that it’s easily accessible, no matter where you’re at. I love to say that our cell phones are portable, powerful command centers, where in the hospital, on the airplane, doesn’t matter where you’re at, when you need a treatment, it’s immediately available, and you know what to do, what to go to first, next, and last.

What you do is you populate this playlist, these specialized playlists with, I love that, objective music. It’s interesting because you think objective versus subjective. “What do you mean by objective? No, music is subjective. What are you talking about?” In this instance, the objective is intentional. We’re intentionally wanting to match music to a landscape of emotions. The magic is taking our mood sequence formula and orchestrating the flow in such a way that a catharsis occurs.

A catharsis is that purification of emotions where anything that could be stuffed or repressed that’s not getting expressed and therefore causing problems is allowed to come out and express in a healthy way. People may be afraid of that. “No, I don’t want to feel it.” What happens in this mood sequence formula is that you don’t stay there. It’s very carefully orchestrated to make sure that you’re not staying there longer than you should because we certainly don’t want to trigger addiction or violence or death by suicide. It is about being able to allow that emotion to rise and release in order to shift to the next.

You reminded me of situations where I have a friend who likes music that you could categorize as very soft, harmonic, melodic, French chansons, and just very light and easy and happy music. They don’t like rock or blues or stuff like that. Now it occurred to me, that you said before about not expressing your emotions and finally, they may come out in a way that is really unpleasant because you are suppressing them. This is just a question, I don’t know whether it’s true or not, I want to see what you think, not wanting to listen to the heavier music to the more aggressive music, they are basically holding back from experiencing those emotions, yet they may have those emotions inside. It could backfire. Am I even making sense when I talk like this?

You are hitting a very strong nerve that we need to talk about. There are three different chronic comfort zones. We’ve talked about the unsettled chronic comfort zone, which is trapping anxiety, anger, depression, and sadness, and not allowing it to be released in a healthy way. There’s also a soothing chronic comfort zone where you don’t want to listen to anything else that takes you out of that soothing state. The truth is our broad emotional landscape is a biological part of us. You’re never not going to feel all of those emotions.

How you address them and release them is important. When you are trapped in a chronic, soothed comfort zone, you are only desiring soothing music and nothing else. “Don’t take me there. I cannot handle it.” The same thing with the third chronic comfort zone, which is energized. The chronic energized comfort zone relates to happiness. If you ever know somebody that’s just grinning and bear it and they never slow down and they never get mad but if there is somebody mad, they skirt the issue and they go somewhere else, they’re not going to address it, don’t want to deal with it.

“No, I don’t hear you.” That’s a chronic energized comfort zone that’s denying appropriate expression potentially of all the other emotions that are necessary. Chronic comfort zones aren’t just about being trapped in anger, anxiety, depression, or sadness. They can be in other zones as well where it’s like a reality check. There is other stuff going on here, we need to deal with it. “No, I don’t want to deal with it, you take care of it.”

The Power Of Musical Appreciation

You are a musician. You play the violin, maybe you play some other instruments. You practiced a lot. You put a lot of work into your craft. I’m only guessing that if I were to take you to any a concert, be it gangster rap or rock or classical and everything, you, my guess is, and please correct me if I’m wrong, would be able to appreciate it because even on the technical side, you say, “How do they do that? That is very interesting to me.” You have this pro ear to listen to, and I think we see it every day. People react very strongly to music that they already know. We go to a concert and now they play their hit song that we all know by heart. It really moves us. They say, “I want to play my new material.” We are all like, “Do we have to listen to it?” What is that all about?

You have potential memories that are connected to the music that you love. You’re not able to relive those memories when they play new music. Might be the same band, but not the music that you want. I will never forget being on tour with Andrea Bocelli. We were in this, I don’t know, 10,000 people, whatever in California and outside. Time to say goodbye, of course, is like his moniker. We go the entire concert without playing it. My audience is like, “We’re not leaving until we hear that.”

Encore one, encore two, encore three. We still haven’t played it yet. We finally get to the last encore, which is the piece they’ve been waiting for all night long. How do you like it, cannot tell you the response that we got within a few notes of playing the music, and starting it. The entire stadium went wild. I could not even hear myself play. It was loud. That thing about being able to relive your connection with that music and the more it gets repressed because they don’t play it, the more anxious you get to hear it. I’m not going to leave until I hear the favorite piece of music.

The Balance Between Practice And Enjoyment For Musicians

When you are a professional musician and the professional musicians I knew were telling me things like they practice four hours a day or very long periods of time per day, just practicing, just to keep the skill, just to keep the sharpness. Now when you practice much, does something get lost there? Does the routine or the workload really that you need to maintain take away from the music appreciation?

That is really a good question. I’m reliving an experience. I went to a music conservatory in Switzerland. Being away from family and friends and anybody that I grew up with, allowed me the luxury of really focusing on performance and practicing. I’ll remember going an entire day, eight hours of practicing, and like six hours into going, “I think I’m hungry.” I was immersed in perfecting the music. It’s an interesting experience to dive into that. It’s like the time standstill for me anyway. Very definitely, musicians go into their work brain.

I’ve discovered in my practice as a music therapist that you have to work differently with the musician as opposed to a non-musician because musicians tend to go into their work brain and not their feeling emotional brain. They’re picking apart the music, they’re dissecting it, they’re wanting to understand the theory behind it, they’re trying to understand the singer-songwriter. It’s actually a little bit more difficult to work with musicians with music listening habits because they decipher things differently.

You could even argue though, from the other point, that it’s not just routine work or rote work that could take away from the appreciation. It could be the opposite. Your skill level is high and you are not mired by technical considerations. You’re not hampered by a lack of theory. You’re right there. All you can do is just be with the music. Maybe that’s a huge advantage to being skilled.

I’ve had people comment about my violin performance because of the training in Switzerland about the difference between American-trained musicians and European-trained musicians. Remember having breathing exercises while I was playing and I’d have to sing my part before I could play it and breathe with it where you don’t get that instruction usually over in the United States. What I’m talking about here is technical proficiency versus emotional proficiency.

There absolutely can be a level of technical fortitude that does not translate into emotional fortitude. They can be absolutely two different things. You can have a very proficient musician that is just highly technical and you’re just wowed but it doesn’t hit you in the heart with the emotion. It’s an interesting observation about musicians that when they are able to communicate emotionally as well as technically, that’s when your senses just come on fire.

Avoiding Physical Strain While Playing The Violin

I was going to say something, but I got quite engrossed in this. From another direction altogether, you play the violin. The violin, I have a certain background in bodywork, I do some bodywork just for fun. The violin is a one-sided instrument and it has to do with your neck. What do you do? What do violinists do to not have neck issues, and back issues because of the many repetitive movements that are one-sided?

First of all, my husband is a chiropractor.

It’s a good match.

I got benefits there and yoga can help to really stimulate both sides. I’m not like this all the time. It is a problem because that’s a whole another work effort and industry about helping musicians heal with problems. I mean, there was one point where I had tendonitis because I was writing the books, I was always on the computer, or I was intensely playing Las Vegas shows, and I was drinking coffee a lot to stay awake I get this book done. I got tendonitis. I think I know what it was. It was playing one particular concert where the entertainer loved to have the stage at 50 degrees and as a performing violinist female, we had to have on very little clothing.

I was freezing. My muscles are really tense and his parts actually were pretty difficult. Usually, they’re not that difficult in playing shows in Vegas. This particular entertainer was good music. It was also taxing. Here you are trying to play really quickly and fast, and your arms are freezing, you’re tense and that also contributed to, I think, the tendonitis. It took me months to change that situation for myself. It is a challenge and how to work through it and being aware of holistic things that you can do and on, because I don’t like taking medication. I want to do a holistic approach if at all possible.

Have you worked with a Feldenkrais practitioner?

No.

I’ll send you an email. Chad will give me that because I’m a Feldenkrais practitioner and my teacher worked with Yo-Yo Ma and some of the big names. There’s a big festival in New York state. I forget the name now, but every year and they would convene. She worked with him. It doesn’t matter that he plays the cello. It’s still, it creates issues. I’m going to send you that one word for you to look and see where do you live.

Co-locate between Las Vegas and Northern Idaho.

The Power Of Music And Its Benefits: Exploring Resources

You’ll be able to find people and you may be surprised at how effective it can be. Now, when I listen to an expert on my show, I get very greedy because just like everyone, I would like to feel better, I’d like to be better, I’d like to be healthier. I’m greedy. You have something that is very clearly very effective music. Nobody can argue the power of vibration. We had on the show, we had a lot of talk about humming and singing and the production of nitric oxide via those activities. Obviously, I’m greedy. I want to get some of the goodness that you worked hard to distill and make available. You have a book and you have an app. Maybe you can tell us about those one at a time.

It's interesting to look at how music provides that thread of being able to thrive no matter what. Share on X

Certainly, you can actually see them on the screen. The book I’ve been wanting for years to write and it finally was released this month, Thriving Through Adversity. It’s about how can you do that with prescriptive playlists that reclaim joy, peace, and purpose in life. As we look at our whole trajectory of life and where we’ve gone and come and orchestrated life as we did, it’s interesting to look at how music provides that thread, being able to thrive no matter what. This book not only chronicles my personal experiences in doing a lot of work, I added up all the years that I worked on a variety of different projects and businesses and totaled 50 years.

I look back at that and go, and I was really busy. “How do you do that? How do you get through that?” This book, Thriving Through Adversity, really details the music medicine protocol that I’ve developed over the last few decades, which is an evidence-based practice. It’s researched thousands of clinical evidence, documented. Throughout the book, this protocol is detailed through dozens of case stories of clients. It’s learning about what’s the protocol, how can I apply this in my own life. Of course, it recommends music from all genres and really helps you to look at life differently not just survive, but how to thrive through that.

It’s a companion to the Key2Mee music app. This music app has been on my brain for a decade. We started really detailing it. I think it’s been six years now ago because we wanted to get a patent for it. We had to really figure out what’s that going to look like. I’m happy to say that the patent was earned this last year and we started immediately building the app which launched as well. The book describes what the app’s importance is. It’s called Key to Me. You’ll see it’s Key2Mee is not a typo.

Mee stands for you actually, Adiel, music exercising emotions with your personal journey. What is that like? This first version out with the app takes you to understanding what your emotional profile is. There’s a quiz you get to take, and right now it is completely free. You go in and take the quiz, and your results are populated immediately, and it connects your emotional profile to your music listening habits.

This emotional profile quiz is based on my decades of working with thousands of people. It’s my clinical advice that is in the results for anyone to pay attention to, “Is that true for me? Is there something else I need to look at here?” There are many links to resources in order to understand, “What do I do now that I have this knowledge?” We are launching right now into a fundraiser where we are going to build version 2.0. Version 2.0 is actually going to enable the user to create their prescriptive playlist.

When is it going to be available?

We’re targeting it being available by the first quarter of 2025. It’s very complicated. There’s nothing out there like it. I’ve got a great app team to do that. Tight now, Key2Mee is free and available and it helps you to discover what is the chronic comfort zone. Am I trapped in one?

Continuing on the long road of greed, can somebody have you as a coach/healer because many of us are lazy and going through the book and going through the resources? I want to have the expert work with me. Can people have access to your healing?

Yeah, absolutely. I’m listed on psychology. You can go in there and we can schedule a telehealth. I’m available constantly.

Do you have a website?

Our website, TheMusic4Life.com.

TheMusic4Life.com. People can schedule probably a Zoom type of appointment with you.

Absolutely, free consult because typically people will maybe have different goals about what this prescriptive playlist is supposed to be able to do. We refine the goals so that they’re realistic. For instance, somebody may come to me and go, “I need a new wife.” I’m like, “Let’s deal with some emotional challenges first and see how the rest of it plays out.” Indeed life changes and evolves differently as a result of now managing your moods differently.

Why We Go Through Phases Of Music Listening

Maybe they should start with, “I need new shoes.” Just to start with the lower bar. I have another question for you. I personally go through periods where I really enjoy listening to music. Of course, I’m probably stuck in my little blues-rock universe, but it’s really fun to listen to the car and listen to Tom. I go through periods, I don’t listen to anything, no music. I listen to the news, I listen to people talk, and I listen to podcasts. Why is that?

Music has a way of triggering emotion, and sometimes we just don't want to feel it, but music can help us navigate that. Share on X

It’s an interesting thing. Music has a way of triggering emotion. You may be in a situation or someone may be in a situation that describes what you just described where “I don’t want to feel. I just don’t want to go there. There’s enough emotion right now in the media that I just want to observe. I don’t want to get caught up in it.”

Makes a lot of sense. Once again, for the benefit of our viewers, and readers, your website is called?

TheMusic4Life.com.

TheMusic4Life.com where four is a number. The app is called Key2Mee. Your book is Thriving Through Adversity. I know that I’m going to be trying to take advantage of your knowledge and expertise. Thank you very much. I learned a lot. I think this is very objectively a resource that everyone should have.

We are seeking to revolutionize mental health care. That’s our goal.

You said before, you don’t like to take drugs and a lot of mental health devolves quickly into taking drugs and those drugs are not free of side effects. It makes it even more important.

Thank you very much, Adiel. I loved having this conversation with you.

Judith, thank you for taking the time. I know you’re busy. We learned a lot. Hope to see you in the future. Thanks for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining me. For more videos, be sure to follow me on Facebook. Got a question? I love questions. Leave it in the comment right below.

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About Judith Pinkerton

The Adiel Gorel Show | Judith Pinkerton | Music

Judith Pinkerton’s passion for music therapy was ignited in Alaska when her solo violin music replaced medication post-surgery in a hospital. She developed the Music4Life® wellness system that translates the Music Medicine medical protocol into training programs and products available in telehealth, ecourses and digital downloads. As a clinician and internship director, author, TEDx speaker and recording artist, Judith is the first to receive a music therapy license in the USA, issued by the Nevada State Board of Health and Department of Education. With over twenty years experience in helping individuals improve health through her Music Medicine Protocol, she has treated over 11,000 patients in addiction treatment centers. Aflac and the Academy of Country Music produced a TV commercial featuring Judith as their first recipient of the Lifting Lives Honor (2018). Judith joins the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada’s Music Study Research Team (2022) currently enrolling employees, including first responders, who will report the effectiveness of Music4Life® Mood Sequence Formulas®. In 2024 she published her book, “Thriving Through Adversity: Prescriptive Playlists to Reclaim Joy, Peace, and Purpose in Life”, which explores the power of music to transform our mental health (available on Amazon). She also released the Key2Mee music therapy app, available in Apple and Google stores.